


The Darkness Without

by hoteldestiel



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Angst, Heartbreak, Heavy Angst
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-31
Updated: 2019-02-26
Packaged: 2019-10-20 01:17:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,129
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17612690
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hoteldestiel/pseuds/hoteldestiel
Summary: The monster's taken over Eliot's body, but he's still in there, somewhere.





	1. Chapter 1

He tried to open his eyes, but he couldn’t. He tried to move his arm, but it stayed where it was. He could feel his body, but he felt disconnected from it, unable to plug his consciousness back into the power source. At first, he thought maybe he’d just been knocked out, that this was the strange place between sleep and waking. Then he felt his arms move, realized he had nothing to do with it, and knew something was wrong. Panic ripped through him, or the part of him that was still him, as he watched himself stand up and shake his arms loose like he was settling into a suit jacket he hadn’t worn before. What the fuck was going on? A flash of memory he didn’t recognize flew across his mind, someone called him Nigel, clapping him on the shoulder, then retreating with a terrified look on their face when he felt another tap at his back. He, with no recollection of doing so, turned around, coming face to face with the woman from Castle Blackspire. He only recognized her now, in retrospect. In the flash of memory, she felt like a stranger.

“Eliot!” she said, her voice unnervingly calm for the crazed look on her face. A loud ringing sounded around them and the lights behind the bar made a horrendous  _ pop pop pop _  sound as they burst against the mirror on the wall.

The woman, the guard, furrowed her brow, but pressed closer, “Eliot I’ve been looking everywhere for you,” she said. There was a chilling innocence to her voice that even Nigel recognized as dangerous, he could feel the fear in the memory. He took a step back, ducking when the ringing resumed and a light fell from the ceiling. “Jesus fuck!” he’d shouted. He knew he didn’t have the accent that came out of his mouth in that memory.

“Hmmm,” the guard considered him carefully, holding him in place when he tried to move back again. She moved her face uncomfortably close to his, looking into his eyes and shaking her head after blinking a few times. “Well, this just won’t do. I need you to be Eliot.”

He remembered a blinding pop of pain that traveled from the base of his skull down his spine, freezing him in an unnaturally stiff position, and then, the unraveling of Eliot in his mind, battling with whoever Nigel had been until he half-disappeared. There were pieces of Nigel still floating around inside his mind, he felt like he could almost reach out and touch them, but the shroud that had separated Nigel from Eliot lifted, and the look of utter glee on the guard’s face as recognition lit his own was enough to make him wish he was Nigel again.

“Good, now let’s go find Quentin.”

_ Quentin. _  It was Eliot‘s last thought before blackness, and now this.

He watched as he moved for the door when he heard the voice of  his - er, no, Nigel’s - friend as they scrambled up, “Bloody hell, Nigel, what was that?”

He tried to speak, but nothing came out. He couldn’t even move his fucking vocal cords. Eliot had seen magic do some fucked up shit in his time, some of which he’d caused, but he’d never seen anything like this. Briefly, he wondered if Quentin felt anything like this in the Scarlotti’s Web his first year. The thought pained him.

“I am not Nigel,” he heard his voice - his real one, not the accented one - say. He saw his hand rise, saw the swift flick of his own nimble fingers and watched the blood spurt and spatter the wall behind Nigel’s friend. Something dropped in his stomach, feeling sick and wrong and tainted as it forced him to watch Nigel’s friend bleeding out on the floor of the pub, the bartender scrambling into the back as fast as he could.

“So messy, humans,” his voice echoed into the space around them as he stepped over broken glass and through pools of blood like it was nothing. He watched himself leave his favorite pub in London - why was he in London? - and walk down the street in a way that he would never walk if he could just get control of his goddamned legs, half-skipping, leaving blood-soaked footprints in his wake. He watched his body turn into an alley and then disappear. When he reappeared, he was in Brooklyn, approaching a coffee shop as a familiar figure stepped outside, balancing a to-go cup on a stack of books.

_ Quentin. No. Quentin, run!  _ He was screaming and nothing came out.

A heavy, suffocating pressure weighed down on him, making it impossible to think, let alone talk. Reduced to the role of witness, he watched Quentin, who believed he was someone else entirely, back away, scrambling, scared. It hurt, even with the unexpected knowledge he had, or the thing that had taken him had, that it wasn’t Quentin on the surface, to see the panic in his eyes as he tried to escape.

“This is gonna be so fun,” he heard his voice say, with a childish thrill, “I think anything is more fun when you do it with a friend.”

He tried, again, to fight back.  _ Run, _  he willed himself to say, but he couldn’t. The thing that had taken him pressed down on him again, harder, unforgiving, until everything went black once more.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Monster takes Brian for pizza

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finding the balance between action and internal monologue has been difficult with this fic, so I hope you guys like the second vignette!

Eliot knew more now. He understood more of it, grimly. He realized somewhere along the line when he wasn't pressed so far down he felt like he stopped existing altogether, that the monster had possessed him. The thing in the castle he thought he'd managed to kill, sparing Quentin from a lifetime of servitude at its hands hadn't actually died. Instead, it found him, possessed him, and found Quentin, capturing him anyway. The exact thing Eliot had tried to stop still happened and this version of it was worse. The only small solace he had was Quentin’s glamour. The fact that, at least for now, it wasn’t fully Quentin witnessing all of this. Still, one truth resonated inside of him with such veracity that he couldn't un-know it no matter how hard he tried.  This was his fault. He'd wanted magic back, yes, but he wasn't willing to let Quentin pay the price for that. He wasn't willing to let Quentin sacrifice when he already had, so much, so often. And now, because of him, Quentin was thrust into something worse. Forced to be the monster's plaything while he exacted revenge on whoever he deemed necessary at any moment, for any reason.

The monster was mercurial, childish, and had a very strict kill first, ask questions later policy. Eliot had watched, what felt like countless times, as blood splattered Quentin after an outburst of anger, or annoyance, or disobedience added another tally to its body count. Every time, he felt a new fissure in his heart open up at the disgusted way Quentin looked at him, and the speed at which he hid the disgust as soon as the monster turned its gaze on him too seriously.

He watched as the monster hooked his arm through Quentin's, felt the pang in his chest when Quentin flinched at the contact before forcing himself to ease into it. The easy way the monster touched Quentin, like he belonged to it, with no questions asked, pissed Eliot off. He'd never been shy about his physicality with anyone, and Quentin was as much a part of that as Margo, or any of their other friends, but from the moment he realized he had feelings for Quentin, he had hesitated, a little, before every touch, afraid it would mean more to him and not enough to Quentin. After the mosaic, the worry had faded when he noticed the ease at which Quentin leaned into him where he hadn't before. Now, with the monster committing atrocities in front of him while wearing Eliot's body, he couldn't see a future where those touches ever came easily again. It broke something deep inside of him that he'd been slowly stitching up, ever since Mike's death.

Quentin admitted he was hungry, and the monster looked at him curiously for a minute.

"Oh, that's right. These bodies need...food, don't they?" his voice asked, and Quentin's brows furrowed as he nodded. "Well, then, food I guess. Yes, let's get food, and I can determine how much time we have before we need to be there."

"Be...where?" Quentin asked, but the monster had already steered them toward a restaurant door. It was a pizza shop, and Eliot could practically taste the cheese and grease from the sweet-charred scent of the wood-fired ovens. The monster was keeping his body nourished, barely, but he wasn't exactly reaping the benefits.

Pizzas were ordered, sodas were filled, and Quentin relaxed the slightest amount in the reserved, breath-held way that you relaxed when you knew the other shoe would drop eventually. He wanted to push back, wanted to try and make his presence known, but knowing that even if he managed it, Quentin wouldn't know who he was, not while he wore the Brian glamour, he didn't know if it was worth it.

He'd learned not to push too hard against the monster's control if he wanted to keep an eye on Quentin. If he pushed too hard, the monster pushed, squeezed, crushed back until he faded to black. Then, at some slow, torturous moment, the monster always brought him back. Eliot wondered if this was part of its game, keeping him as a prisoner trapped in a cell of his own body, buried so deeply he couldn't do anything about it, but not so deeply that he couldn't see what the monster was doing with his hands, with his body. If he ever figured out how to make himself known, he didn't want to waste it when Eliot meant nothing to Brian.

The server who delivered their pizzas lingered at the table too long, telling a story that he could feel the monster didn't want to hear. He could sense the boredom, could nearly touch the exact moment it hardened into hatred, and see, with sickening clarity, as the hatred resulted in action. It was a tiny movement, nearly imperceptible, nothing more than a twitch of his wrist, but a long incision ripped up the server's torso and spread, the blood landing on both of them, as well as their food. A woman screamed to the left, but the monster made quick work of silencing her, too.

"So high-pitched," his voice said, in a cool, detached tone. Everything inside of him loathed hearing the monster talk, hearing his own voice sound like that in the face of so much carnage.

"I want ice cream," the monster said suddenly, standing and pulling Quentin up with him. "I saw a truck on the way, let's go. Quickly."

The monster might not have, but Eliot caught the paralyzed shock on Quentin's face. Even if it wasn't Quentin, Eliot, thanks to some trick of the monster's magic, could see him as though he was. The look shredded something in him, knowing it was Eliot's face he saw, Eliot's hands he associated with the pain and blood and brokenness. This wasn't torture, it was something beyond that, and he didn't know how much more of it he could take.

 


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eliot encounters the monster's fear.

Eliot would never forget the first moment he felt the monster's fear. He'd assumed it didn't exist, that something as evil and outwardly proud of it couldn't possibly have emotions like fear, but he was wrong. So fucking wrong. He watched as the monster sliced the throat of the ice cream man for something as ridiculous as sprinkles, his heart sinking at the way the blood splattered Quentin, the disgusted way he sunk back into himself without letting the monster know how appalled he was. He wasn't sure what was worse, watching the carnage committed at his fingertips or watching as Quentin became increasingly withdrawn, resigned, terrified and paralyzed at every sidelong glance, every sudden movement, every death he was forced to witness. 

"Hey, is there a-another game we can play? One where we don't...flay anybody?" Quentin asked, and Eliot's fear spiked at the annoyance he felt rising in the monster. It was one of the worst things he'd ever experienced, knowing that the Brian version of Quentin was always just one wrong move away from boring the monster enough to no longer be useful. The Quentin version of Quentin would have known, better, how to handle the monster's murderous whims, how to appease it. Brian, who had no idea what he was up against, really, was useless in the grand scheme of things. Eliot was acutely aware that the monster was only keeping Quentin alive because he could see through the Brian glamour. He worried the monster’s patience with that “game” had a very limited threshold.

"Oh, but he deserves it, sad little man we are calling Brian," the monster said, in the weird, affected tone Eliot had gotten used to hearing his own voice in. 

"Why? What'd he do?" Quentin asked, and that was when Eliot felt it. Fear, pressing him down and away, like the monster didn't want him to know it existed, either. It was sharp, and lonely, and if he hadn't been trapped in his own mind as a prison, forced to watch the horrendous way the monster dealt with this fear, he might have even felt a little sorry for the monster, recognizing the desperation behind the terror. 

"He knows, just like how all of your - friends know, too," the monster responded. 

"Friends, what friends -?" Quentin responded, but the monster cut him off in a hurry. 

"Oh but we can't talk about it, Brian-Not-Brian. Your glamour gets very angry if I even say your name too much," it said, and whatever almost-pity Eliot felt for the monster disappeared in an instant as he continued to speak. "Look, it's better if you don't know what I'm talking about. These...friends. I'm going to kill them, and we have to assume it's going to happen in front of you. It will hurt less if you don't know who they are."  _ No. Margo. No.  _

Eliot didn't hear or feel or see what the monster did next, he was too busy fighting, fighting forward, trying to use this moment of fear to leverage his own strength. If the monster was afraid, if it could feel the sharp terror Eliot had encountered, that meant there was a weakness to exploit. If he could just...figure it out. Before he could dissect it any further, the monster pressed him down into blackness again. 

****

Of all the ways Eliot had come to after being shoved away by the monster, his hand deep in the warm, wet chest cavity of a man pressed up against a tree was by far the most revolting. He could feel the righteous anger of the monster, the victory it believed it was about to win, he could see every ounce of terror and excruciating pain on the man's face. No - not a man, Eliot realized as the excitement fell in the monster - a God. He was forearm deep in the chest cavity of a motherfucking God. 

The way-too-literal body search went on for a few minutes, and with every passing minute that the monster couldn't locate what it was looking for, Eliot felt its fear creeping back in again, cold and all-consuming. 

"You're not Enyalius," it said finally, and Eliot felt his hand crush something crucial inside of the maybe-not-God, felt the blood rush out of whatever was crushed running down his arm. "You're his servant, Corybant." 

Eliot was scrambling when he heard Quentin's voice, pleading with the monster, the fear eclipsed momentarily by frustration, something Eliot had seen be deadly on many occasions. Eliot wanted to shake the Brian version of Quentin for repeatedly getting Quentin so close to death. It made him want to scream, but he had no control of his vocal cords to release the agonizing pressure building inside of him.  _ Shut! Up!  _ he screamed internally, watching with horror as the monster turned to face Quentin. By some miracle of priority, the God's servant held its attention more raptly, and the monster turned back, shoving his hand further, further into the chest of the servant. Eliot felt a sick sense of relief that it wasn't Quentin's chest his fingers were scrambling around in, looking for the right organ to destroy. 

"Why did your master send you to trick me?" It asked, and Eliot felt the fear trickle back in, rushing like a strong wind nearly blowing Eliot over when the servant responded, "He knows." 

This time, Eliot sat back, tried to observe the fear instead of manipulate it, hoping that if he could get a better understanding of it, maybe leveraging it would be easier next time. If there was a next time. He watched the way it shook what usually felt so impenetrable about the monster, the way it made a small fissure that went all the way up, and he noted where it stopped, wondering if there was something important about that, too. He was going to find a way out of here, he had to. 

There was a strange commotion behind him, and when he turned, something was different. The weird offness that had surrounded Quentin since the first time he'd seen him from inside the monster's body was gone.  _ No. Yes. No.  _ He couldn't decide which feeling should prevail, gut-wrenching heartbreak that it was Quentin, now, seeing him do these things instead of the Brian version of him, or heart-soaring hope that if he found a way to get back to his body somehow, now, it would be Quentin who heard him. 

"Quentin, you're back," the monster said, and Eliot, who had grown accustomed to listening to the monster use his voice, hated every second of it all over again, now that it was Quentin hearing it.  _ Fuck.  _ Quentin stepped up, tutting, and something inside of Eliot broke, fell away. He was so quick to act, so quick to fire a spell off at him, even if it wasn't Eliot, not really, he was casting at, the lack of hesitation still hurt. 

"Oh, you wanted to play," the monster said as it moved its arm and Corybant fell to the ground. Quentin stepped back, and the angry terror that flitted across his face then broke another piece of him. "Sorry, he's too dead."  _ It's not me, it's not me, it's not me.  _ Eliot pleaded, and hoped, god how he hoped, Quentin knew that, somehow, as the monster looked on with cold, heartless eyes. 

 


End file.
